


In My Sickness

by Margo_Kim



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Pre-Canon, Religion, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-05
Updated: 2012-11-05
Packaged: 2017-11-18 00:36:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/554949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A retired Alliance agent lies dying in his bed when a young doctor asks him to commit treason to help save his sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In My Sickness

**Author's Note:**

> Originally inspired by John Donne's "Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness." Beta'd by [Ias](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias) who very patiently pointed out all the parts that didn't make sense. Concrit welcome!

Han is dying. He does not need any doctor to tell him that, though they have many times, without ceasing. They pump him full of chemicals, tether him to machines, to squeeze out of him what life remains. They presume to stop the sun in sky, but it is not the same sun that Joshua appealed to. This light is less wielding. Han is dying and soon he will be dead. He accepts this inevitability with as much humility he can muster. Only Methuselah lived longer than him, and the nature of the verse is that, sooner or later, everyone dies. Everyone returns home. That is God’s gift.

Han would prefer the gift of a slightly longer life or, more accurately, a different one, but his deathbed seems like a poor place to argue with gospel. And now as he approaches that dark, final hour, his faith is all he has that is worth having, the comfort of the old, familiar words the only comfort left to him. He will not cast them aside once they have grown inconvenient.

“Exiles learned the bitter rules of banishment,” the Final Testament tells him. “SUBMIT, God commanded, but not knowing which way to bow, we ceased to do so and stood upright all day long. We forgot the sound of His pain He had suffered for our sake. Our feet had never touched the soil where Christ’s blood and Adam’s sweat fell. They were old roles for an old world. The ways of our father’s mother’s father’s mother’s father cannot be ours. We cannot be here what we were there. Out in the black we must become something new.” Ienagu 1:32:25, the New Haven translation. He keeps his copy on his bedside table. When he has the strength, he reaches over and rests his hand on it.

When he dies, his soul will return to Earth That Was. Where, he wonders, did the souls of his long-dead ancestors go? For those who had corrupted Eden, where did their souls rest? Their sin scattered their children across the universe. When they died, did they stay where they were? What reward could have been greater than their home? “The World before Worlds has no peer in the sky. It was built by God, Blessed Be His Names, for his people of dirt and aether. Wander into the black as far as you can, children, but know that salvation lies behind you.” Ienagu 2:14:90.

Salvation lies behind you. Too late in a life of secrecy, lies, and fear had Han learned to respect those words.

“Wansui? How are you feeling today?” The youngest of the doctors that serve Han bows as he enters the room. Han likes him, for all his nervous obsequiousness. He works harder than most young men Han knows. He works harder than all the old ones. He obtained this honored job of stopping a dying man from doing so through family connections; the young Dr. Tam knows it, resents it, and works hard to prove he earned it.

“No better. No worse,” Han says. He holds his stiff hands in his lap, draws himself up straight. The doctors are not his allies in this place. They report his weakness to those Han once called his colleges, those men who are rapacious about their secrets. They wish to know when Xu Mao Han, the oldest of the Alliance’s Whisper Men, is dead, his mouth shut forever. He does not think they are killing him, of course. Han is paranoid within reason, and his vultures are cunning. They know time will silence an old man as effectively as poison or bullet, and they are in no rush. These doctors guard Han on his way to the grave only as a precautionary measure. They know Han has no one to tell his secrets too. They know Han has never been a rebel.

He laughed to himself, sharp and humorless. If they knew the secrets he had kept from them, his sickbed would not be so gentle nor so kind.   

The young doctor is unusually silent today. Even now, Han makes a habit of noticing unusual things. “I did not think you were scheduled today,” Han says.

Tam flinches, quick as a blink. “No,” he says. “I am covering for my colleague.”

“You are too early in the afternoon to cover Dr. Boyuan’s shift.”

“Why wait?” He says it with the tight smile of a nervous secret. Let him keep it. Han has neither the time nor the energy for a child’s intrigue. Han leans back in his pillow and observes as Tam checks the beeping and blaring machines he’s hooked Han too. They refuse to silence them, no matter how Han complains. If they were silent, we wouldn’t know if something went wrong, the doctors tell him. What a tragedy that would be. No, Han should not be bitter at life. If he can accept his death, he can accept his life as well. Still when one is as old and as sick as he is, there is little pleasure in another day. Although, Han thinks as he looks at Dr. Tam, one may find some remaining scrap worth savoring.

“Tell me, daifu, will your sister visit?” Han asks as neutrally as he can. “It has been so long since she last came.”

Tam’s fingers, more dexterous on the medipad than a master pianist at her instrument, freeze. “No,” the young doctor says at last and without looking at him. “She’s decided to stay at school over the holidays.”

When Han was younger, when he made the mistake of complaining about disappointment to the priestess of his mosque, she made him write out Babatunde, chapter four, canto four until the sun set and his hand cramped: “Do not curse the pettiness of the verse. Kindness is not found naturally in the black. The cold foreign stars have no obligation to love you.” The lessons stuck. Now he is far, far older, and he keeps his complaints locked behind his teeth.

Still, he thinks as Tam still stands unmoving, he would have liked to watch the child dance once more.

 “Wansui Han,” the young doctor says, “I want you to know that it has been an honor to work with you. The senior doctors of course have your files, and I have handpicked my replacement from my class. Dr. Atul is a very gifted doctor. She will take good care of you.”

Han sits up at that, or he tries at least before he decides that his shock need not be expressed physically. “You are leaving me?”

Tam types away and avoids Han’s eyes. “I am taking a leave of absence from the hospital. I’ve decided to do some travelling.”

“It will be very difficult to get your job back after extended leave.”

“Yes,” Tam says very quietly. He coughs and speaks normally again. “I don’t imagine I’ll work with them again.”

“Why are you going?”

“I never took a gap year. It’s traditional on my planet, but I wanted to get to work. Now, I think I might like to see the verse.” He pauses. “The moons of Castor are beautiful in the winter,” Tam says, low and urgent.

Now Han sits up, his body be damned. He knows those words. He _knows_ them.

“But not so beautiful as the Evre Waterfalls in the dusk,” Han replies. The words taste rusted. The Castor identification code has not been in use among the rebel forces for at least thirty Standard years, but he remembers the greetings by heart.

“I prefer the Roaring Springs,” Tam says urgently, “but the stars shine above either place.”

There is a very long silence as they glance at the door, closed tight and shut. They are sealed from the outside world. “Who are you?” Han asks. “How do you know those words?”

Tam shakes his head. “I’m no one, not like you’re thinking.  A mutual friend told me to say that to you.”

“Who?”

“A woman who goes by the codename the Revanchist. She said that you might remember her better as Yvette. Do you know her?”

It was sixty years since Han had seen her midnight hair, her scarred mouth, her eyes like lightning and rain. All this time he had thought her dead. A naïve hope, a foolish one, held by a love struck man old enough to know better. “Yes, I know her,” Han said softly. “How do you?”

“She works with a group that is helping me. Wansui, something has happened to my sister,” Tam says, a desperation creeping into his voice that Han can barely mark right now. Yvette is _alive_. “The school is doing something to my sister. She’s in pain. She asked for my help. This woman, her people, they say they can help me, but they need Alliance access codes to the Yalda asteroid to get me close enough to get her out.”

The Yalda asteroid. That wrenches Han’s mind out of the past. There is only one Alliance facility near there. Han shuts his eyes and summons the strength to pinch the bridge of his nose. He knows what they must be doing to her there.

“And Yvette gave you my name?” Han asks. The name sticks on his tongue. After the Alliance agents captured her on Sagan Fi, she earned many nicknames in her infamy, but her name went unspoken. Even by him. It was safer for Han to treat her as the other Whisper Men did—the nameless traitor, the rebel whore, the cautionary tale who got what she deserved. Safer to pretend that he believed it.  

Tam tightens his lips like he doesn’t want the next words to slip out. “No,” he says at last. “I suggested you to her. She agreed, eventually. There is no one else who can or would help.”

Had they tortured her? No, a pointless question when he knew the answer. She was an Alliance double agent. She was trying to destroy the citadel of civilization. She stole information and traded it to the barbarians on the Rim. Yes, they had tortured her, of course. They had tortured her for as long as she was in their hands, and because of the help of brilliant men like Han, they knew how to torture her more efficiently than any human had ever tortured any other. In all that time, in all that pain, she must never have said his name. If it had slipped from between her bleeding lips, Han would have been screaming alongside her. Two traitors in the fire together.

And even now, even after his betrayal, she seeks to shield him from her work.

“And in your desperation,” Han says, “you would make demands from a dying man.”

“I am asking you for a line of code to a small out-of-the-way port to save my sister’s life.”

“You are asking me to commit treason.”

“Yes,” Tam says blunt as a bludgeon. “She told me about your past. You worked for the Alliance, but you were sympathetic to rebellion once.”

In his lap, Han’s hand curls into a fist. “Once,” he says. “And I suffered for it.” _And I was never brave enough for it to have mattered._

Tam drops the medipad on the foot of the bed and drops to one knee by Han’s side so that they are eyelevel. “Please,” he whispers. “They’re hurting her.”

For all that he is a proud man, Tam begs with no shame. He feels no shame. He appeals for the life of his sister, and if that means he must kneel, then he will kneel with his honor untarnished. He looks to Han with pleading eyes and a set mouth. He will rescue his sister with or without Han’s help. They both know this. He will die without the access code and his mission will fail. They both know this too.  

Han has had this conversation before, the appeal for treason via Han’s better nature. His answer was different then. He had been so young, so eager then. He still believed that he could change the verse for the better. Unbidden, the memory rises, Han as a man of forty. He sat in a park next to a woman he had just sworn he would die for and with. “I’ll go by Revanchist,” she told him. “It’s an old word from Earth That Was. We all need codenames, after all. If we are going to try and bring down an empire, we can’t just sound like shmucks off the street. Come on then, sweetie. Who are you going to be, my handsome new double agent?”

“I can’t think of anything as dramatic as yours,” Han had said, and she had grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. “What does it mean?”

“The regaining of old territory,” she said. Her eyes glinted like knives in the dark. “Reclamation. Retaliation. Revenge.”

“A harsh definition.”

Revanchist smiled a humorless smile. “Your Alliance thinks because they’ve seen something, they have claim to it. I intend to make they pay in blood for every planet they’ve stolen.” She looked down at him and for the first time, he feared her fire. He feared what she’d burn. “Don’t you want to make the bastards pay?”

As Han said yes, he knew he’d been lying.

Sixty years Han had thought her dead. Sixty years he had mourned her. Why had she never come back to him?

He knows.

If Tam feels no shame, then Han will bear it in his place. He is a coward, but not an unapologetic one. “They will find out what you have done and they will kill you,” Han says. “And they will kill me as well.”

“They might,” Tam agrees.

“And they will not be kind as they do it.”

“No, they will not.”

“Then how can you ask me to do this?”

Because you are dying. The answer, unsaid, hangs in the air. You are an old sick man dying in a bed and she is a young beautiful girl that will die in one of the dark places of the verse.

But they will find Han. Whether Tam succeeds or not, the Alliance will hunt down all who could have helped him. And like Tam said, there is no one else he could have turned to. They will find Han and they will torture him for spite. Perhaps he will die before they can. It’s likely, in fact. Or perhaps he will not. These doctors will not let him slip away. They will make him linger as long as they can. And if the Alliance wants him to linger longer still to make their displeasure with him known, Han could outlive God as they enact their judgment.

If Han would not risk pain for the sake of a woman whose face had kept him awake for six long decades, he will not risk pain for a slip of a girl who visited his sickbed a year ago and danced for him with a sweet smile on her face.

Han cannot look at Tam any longer. He turns his head to the bedside table where his battered copy of the Final Testament rests. Unbidden by conscious thought, his fist uncurls and rises to rest on the soft leather. It feels warm under his palm.

To punish His children for their wickedness, to save His children from themselves, God banished them from the home He built and washed His hands off them. Banished from their home, they scattered across the galaxy like ashes on the wind. His children became their own deities, built their own worlds, steered their own fate while the God that loved them paced the floor of His heavenly bedroom and saw, more clearly than any human has ever seen the clearest thing, the way that the worlds should be. Does he watch Han now? He is sorry, Lord, he is truly sorry. For his God is a loving God and had designed for Han a better life than he had lived, had designed Han to be a better man that he had been.

Han grabs Tam’s arm and squeezes as tightly as he can manage. “When you go back to her, when she asks you what happened—tell Yvette I how sorry I am. They wanted to know the names of her coconspirators. I could have stepped forward. It wouldn’t have saved her, but it would have eased her pain. I stayed silent. I didn’t want to endure what she was enduring. I have always been the coward she refused to believe I was. Even now there is no bravery. Just a dying man with nothing to lose.” Han lets Tam go and falls back on his pillow. It is a wonder he does not fall straight through the bed and the floor as well. His body feels so heavy. “Tell her how truly sorry I am.”

The sound of beeping is the only noise in the room. Tam holds his breath.

_And God said to Kimbe, her name be written in the sky—oh my final prophet, speak my final commandment unto my children. This is I order to all and to one: Be kind when kindness is hard, my exiled beloveds. Do not curse the pettiness of the verse. Kindness is not found naturally in the black. The cold foreign stars have no obligation to love you. They do not know you. Look for kindness instead in the eyes of your siblings, for I made all humans from the dust of Earth that Was and so all humans are siblings._

“Each asteroid changes the codes every two Standard weeks, and they cannot be relayed through an unofficial channel,” Han says. “I can get them for you, but you must act quickly. The Academy has impeccable security. Are you prepared for that?”

Tam rests his forehead on the bed for a moment. Han fears that he is crying, but when he lifts his head, his eyes are dry and determined. “Thank you,” he whispers fiercely.

Tam stays silent as Han relays the wave. After a moment, the code arrives. Han makes the young doctor memorize it before he wipes out the message from the cortex. It’s an old habit, the result of thirteen decades of well-placed paranoia. Never write your secrets down. Lock them in your head where no one may read them—though this hiding place that had served humans so faithfully since the dust of Eden is not the lockbox that it once was. The Alliance is clever like that.

“Leave tonight,” Han says. “Take nothing. If your sister has been allowed to communicate with you, you are almost certainly under observation.”

Tam nods. “Revanchist—Yvette—expected that.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small white envelope. “She told me to give this to you if you said yes.”

The looping ink of her handwriting spelling out his name stabbed at his heart. She always had loved calligraphy. With a shaking hand that Han could even pretend to blame on illness, he takes it. From the irregular weight, he knows it is not a letter before he coaxes it open. A simple square locket on a long silver chain falls into his hand. He sees the ornate cursive Y engraved into the metal before he curls his fist shut. “Thank you,” he says. “Tell her I said thank you.” Tam wants to ask what the necklace means, Han can see it on his face, but he nods. He wouldn’t understand even if Han told him. _It is a hole in the net, my young doctor. It is an escape._

“You must go,” Han says. “Dr. Boyuan will arrive any moment. She will question where you are here, daifu, so early and on your day off. It will raise questions you don’t need raised.”

Han can see the curiosity leave Tam’s eyes; duty returns. “Thank you,” Tam says again, his mind already half a galaxy away. He backs to the door. “Thank you. I won’t forget this.” Meaningless words. Tam and Han will never see each other again in this lifetime. His hand raises and hovers like he wants to reach out and touch Han, one last benediction from the young doctor, but he steps back, his hand against his chest. With a bow, Tam is gone, out the door and down the hall and running. He will never stop running.

As the sound of his footsteps die away, Han uncurls his fingers. The locket has both an obvious inner compartment and one so small and secretive that only the most careful eyes could find it. They both distract from the chain. With trembling fingers, Han unscrews the clasp and tips the thin hollow metal tube that makes up the chain into the palm of his hand—powder, finer than sand and whiter than snow. Is this forgiveness? A small pile of tasteless, painless death?

He tips it into his mouth. _God bless you, Yvette. God bless your mercy._

Here on the threshold where all he has done will fade and all he has left undone will linger, he reaches out for his book and presses it against his chest. That is all he has now—faith and hope, not even for himself, but for a young doctor with no future and the young girl Han helped save with his last breath. Beep, beep, beep go the machines. Soon Han will as well. He has never died before, but he knows the feel of it.

_Child, my child, why do you weep?_ he hears as his eyes drift shut. The Twelfth Psalm of the Stars. He would die with faith on his lips if he had the strength to speak. _If you fear death, take solace in the lives yet to come for they will earn the rest you now reach. Death is no tragedy to those who have spent their love and life. Death is the return. You have lived in houses, but you have never been home. Come home. There is no sadness waiting for you. You found sadness out in the black, the void you were never meant to reach. Come home, my child, come home. You have wandered long and far, and your body is weary. Come home and lie in the bed I have made you._

Yvette’s smile flashes in the dimming light as doctors flood his room.

_My love, my child, my angels of dust, you were born for the joy of death. Rejoice. Now is the returning. Now you return._

 


End file.
